I think a variant of this mod to allow more constructions (starting with increase the limit of 10 clogs ) in normal games could be very interesting and could change marine gameplay.
In fact, marines should buy grenades launcher/flame tower/grenades to have a chance against aliens .
Put structures on wall is also a great idea.
Of course marines should have a "boost" (like flame tower -30% cost and/or clogs absorb less damages) to keep the games equilibrated.
Features:
Once you join a team, use Weapon5 to switch between player and spectator mode. You can go from Gorge or ExoGorge to Spectator by pressing 5, or go from Spectator to Gorge by pressing Weapon5.
Improvements:
Performed physics optimizations.
Removed animations from models (Some models were displaying a state I didn't want to use, so those still have animations).
GorgeCraft is now feature complete. All that remains is customization and tweaking gameplay. Sorting out model rotation on placing objects is the final big tweak, a few other improvements here and there, then it is getting the new menu icons made, creating a custom menu cinematic and design, add menu music and add a little Spectator UI.
Soul_RiderMod BeanJoin Date: 2004-06-19Member: 29388Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
Hmm, is there anyway to adjust collision models in code? I am currently running with a Gorge at 25% it's normal size, but full size collision mesh. Can it be reduced?
Soul_RiderMod BeanJoin Date: 2004-06-19Member: 29388Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
edited March 2014
Working on some shrinking ideas for the 2nd mod, but if I can get them working, I may backport some of them into GorgeCraft. Working on making the playing world smaller...
And here is a video showing something interesting about collision when you shrink the player model..
Soul_RiderMod BeanJoin Date: 2004-06-19Member: 29388Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
I've just done a quick run-through and GorgeCraft has survived 264 intact. I am hoping to release an update soon, mainly cosmetic for now, although with hopefully a couple of fixes too
Soul_RiderMod BeanJoin Date: 2004-06-19Member: 29388Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
GorgeCraft is very close to Release Candidate stage. I am just awaiting some custom content, which I have to add, and thanks to great work by @SamusDroid, my menu bug has been fixed. An old piece of code that Samus remembered about, originally created by @Sewlek did the job I have to put the finishing touches to the new custom map I made as well, but I hope to have the RC complete within a couple of days.
If anyone can offer me some assistance doing some closed beta testing, offering a server to test multi-player or possibly providing some media content, I would be very glad to hear from you.
Things are well on target for the 28th April 2014 Release.
Soul_RiderMod BeanJoin Date: 2004-06-19Member: 29388Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
OK, got a couple of weird bugs....
One issue I need to look at further, but one issue has me completely confused....
I play GorgeCraft, then do a vote reset. The vote passes and the game resets fine. However, the red-plug then appears, and if I try to move, I just rubberband all over the place.
This is where it gets weird...
So I open up profiler to see what the problem is and, bam, the problem is gone. The game is doing nothing:
Then I turn off the profiler, and sometimes the bug recurs instantly, or sometimes it's gone. Most times it keeps recurring.
This bug happens about 50% of the time after resetting for me, but not all the time. The only thing that happens is a small rendering hike which still uses less than 1ms, and that is just waiting for GC job to finish.
McGlaspiewww.team156.comJoin Date: 2010-07-26Member: 73044Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, Squad Five Gold, Reinforced - Onos, WC 2013 - Gold, Subnautica Playtester
edited April 2014
Sounds like something is supposed to trigger/reset during the game reset event and isn't. Or your reset routine could be dependent upon stateful data (expects somethig to == bla) when it isn't and it needs that value to proceed.
Soul_RiderMod BeanJoin Date: 2004-06-19Member: 29388Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
You are probably right there @McGlaspie , but at the moment, I can't see the issue anywhere in the code..
BTW, GorgeCraft testers needed. I've run out of ideas to break the mod, obviously apart from incompatibility with other mods, haha. I've covered everything I can think of, but obviously, as I know the limitations, I may not to think to do some crazy stuff.
If you are interested in trying to break GorgeCraft to ready it for final release, please left me know!!
RC complete and 2 week bug hunt begins - Release on schedule.
Soul_RiderMod BeanJoin Date: 2004-06-19Member: 29388Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
I have found a big GorgeCraft bug, that is game-breaking, but gives no errors or anything. I have been unable so far to resolve it, so I thought I'd post a little video of the issue here to see if anyone can offer advice on where to look...
The issue as shown forces prediction to go up to an obscene level of frames. According to profile, there is nothing happening code wise of interest. There doesn't seem to be any specific cause for the issue, it will happen at random, although it will also nearly always occur after a successful reset vote, the video above is just during normal gameplay. In total I spent over an hour trying to diagnose this while videoing, and I am at a complete blank. Any help would be gratefully appreciated..
Soul_RiderMod BeanJoin Date: 2004-06-19Member: 29388Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
edited April 2014
Today is a very proud day. The official release of GorgeCraft. GorgeCraft is 2 years old today, and I have just released the finished mod. I hope you all enjoy playing the game.
Unfortunately, I have been too busy to create any new media, so I don't have a wonderful video to accompany this release, but just use your imaginations and pretend it is the best launch trailer ever!!
If anyone can assist with making any media etc for the mod, I would appreciate the assistance, I feel a little bit of a sad panda releasing such a monumental update to the mod and having no media to present.
Soul_RiderMod BeanJoin Date: 2004-06-19Member: 29388Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
OK, I have released an update to GorgeCraft which restores the default NS2 menu options for now. This will enable those of you who are stuck with the mod loaded to be able to turn the mod off.
The game is playable, however there are a few errors that spam through console. While they didn't cause any issues in my very short tests, they may cause issues over a long play period, just to let you know. I will be getting around to fixing them soon.
For now, enjoy GorgeCraft, and for some of you, NS2..
Soul_RiderMod BeanJoin Date: 2004-06-19Member: 29388Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
OK, it turns out my update was very short lived, as CDT released 272 and broke the mod again.
I petitioned UWE 18months aftyer release to leave the game alone, so us modders could make mods and have them run without baby-sitting them every 2 secs, and they did, before handing over to the CDT. If anything the issue has got worse with the CDT, now every CDT update breaks my mods, whereas at least I would survive the odd UWE NS2 update.
If the CDT can't find a way to update the game without breaking mods, I will have to take the three current mods I am working on to a completely different engine.
I am sick and tired of trying to improve the playerbase and diversity of games available for NS2, only to have another bunch of modders break all my efforts every time they release a patch.
CDT, either learn to consider other modders who are trying to make content for this game, or you will drive away the last remaining non-gaming members of the community who are trying to help NS2 to grow and be sustainable.
matsoMaster of PatchesJoin Date: 2002-11-05Member: 7000Members, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, Squad Five Gold, Reinforced - Shadow, NS2 Community Developer
Mmm... maintaining backwards compatibility in NS2 is pretty much impossible - any change at all you do in the Lua code can break someones mod.
Now, there _is_ the "requires build" thing, which - SHOULD - give you the lua from a specific build, so you might think it could protect you.
Unfortunately, some performance improvements or bug fixes in the Spark Engine needs the Lua code to change as well (happened in 272)... so running old Lua code on a new engine is not guaranteed to work either.
Now, in general it is really, really difficult to maintain backwards compatibility in ANY system.
The NS2 architecture, which is supposedly "modding friendly", actually makes it utterly impossible. Sure, you can mod anything ... but unless you make a copy of the whole game (including the engine), your mod can be broken by any new patch.
The more ambitious the mod, the worse it gets.
Pretty much the only way of solving that would be for NS2 to support "stable" releases. A stable release would be a frozen copy of the whole game, so no matter what happens in the future, your mod would not break as long as it was based on a stable release.
Of course, any improvements in the game after the stable release would not be visible in your mod, but at least you could convert to later stable releases at your leisure.
Unfortunately, this is not how NS2 is designed... which does mean that "modding friendly" turns out to be "modding hell" in practice.
It _might_ be possible to actually implement this - but it is a fairly major undertaking. Though an interesting one .... and worthwhile from the point of view of CDT, because it would mean that we would be free to change whatever we want in the code without having to worry about breaking mods.
Which we do, btw - it is just that the only practical way of NOT breaking mods is to stop changing anything at all...
If it means a better vanilla ns2 experience, then so be it. More finger wagging at the CDT? They've made lots of great improvements that are definitely worth any issues w/ any mods (especially those that are rarely if ever played). If you think that gorgecraft contributes at all to ns2's sustainability... then I dunno what to say. Threatening to take your mods to another engine is really... funny. Honestly you'd probably be better off, though. If you're tryin to get a wide audience to play your mods, then ns2 is probably the wrong game as far as garnering attention.
Not trying to knock your hard work, I guess I'm just playing devil's advocate. CDT, plz continue standard operating procedure.
Soul_RiderMod BeanJoin Date: 2004-06-19Member: 29388Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
I would never knock the work of the CDT, they have made enormous improvements to both the game and engine. The post is more about my frustration. I was sold a dream by UWE, that NS2 would be the most mod-friendly thing since half-life, and I bought into it.
I have spent 4 years modding NS2, and would like for nothing more than to create a mod that becomes popular, draws more gamers into purchasing NS2, and have some of those players prefer NS2 and move onto that instead.
Ultimately, my modding goals are about extending the life of NS2, I just feel frustrated that I don't get the opportunity to give back.
Also, while it may be true that breaking my GorgeCraft mod may not really matter as not many play it (although I will point out GorgeCraft does have a few players still, when it is working...), the biggest problem by continually breaking mods is making it impossible for the users to play NS2.
As an example, the big menu update that happened with 267 broke my custom GorgeCraft menu completely. To the point that if you had the mod activated, as a large number of players did, the corrupt menu mean't they couldn't unload mod, meaning they couldn't play GorgeCraft OR NS2. For 2 poor users (that I know about, there may have been more), who I have have been trying to help, have been unable to play NS2 since 267 because of this update, and the fact I was offline.
It wasn't until I released this recent update, they were able to turn off the mod and play NS2 again.
Before you ask, I had done full tech support, including full nuke and they just had this weird issue where GorgeCraft would always load.
Anyway, regardless of your opinion of mods, CDT's breaking of mods does impact on NS2 players, whether it has affected you or not.
All I want is some sort of system where mods break less frequently. My mod uses very little NS2 code as it is, but the interfaces it does have are always being broken. But as Matso pointed out, and I am already painfully aware, even if I was to write my mods from the ground up, using no NS2 code at all, the constant engine updates would ultimately cause something to break anyway.
I know you don't care about mods, and that is your prerogative, I however do care about mods, so I guess we will have to agree to disagree on their importance to NS2 and whether something should be tried to make NS2 more mod friendly.
I know Future Perfect is being developed for modding, but it is still an unknown quantity about how it is going to perform and how flexible it will ultimately be. Personally, at the moment, I am more comfortable with the abilities and limitations of the NS2 spark engine.
Please don't read this back as a rant or anything like that, It is simply a chilled out explanation of my thoughts, where I have waffled on too long... as I'm prone to do
I understand where you're coming from and I agree 100%. And I do indeed care about mods, there's quite a few mods I find very useful, and it's just as annoying when those ones break too. I know I may come off as a dick, so thank you for your "chilled out" response. Just dont want to see ns2 development potentially held back by trying to retrofit updates to work w/ mods that may become obsolete.
Comments
http://www.twitch.tv/soulrider/b/509058510
I made 3 objects d'art!! hahaha :P Sorry about the music, my collection was on random, so either you'll like it or you won't :P
d'art.....Cest fantastiqe!
I think a variant of this mod to allow more constructions (starting with increase the limit of 10 clogs ) in normal games could be very interesting and could change marine gameplay.
In fact, marines should buy grenades launcher/flame tower/grenades to have a chance against aliens
Put structures on wall is also a great idea.
Of course marines should have a "boost" (like flame tower -30% cost and/or clogs absorb less damages) to keep the games equilibrated.
You are not likely to see this in the main game, for many reasons, performance being one!!
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=219694646
Features:
Once you join a team, use Weapon5 to switch between player and spectator mode. You can go from Gorge or ExoGorge to Spectator by pressing 5, or go from Spectator to Gorge by pressing Weapon5.
Improvements:
Performed physics optimizations.
Removed animations from models (Some models were displaying a state I didn't want to use, so those still have animations).
GorgeCraft is now feature complete. All that remains is customization and tweaking gameplay. Sorting out model rotation on placing objects is the final big tweak, a few other improvements here and there, then it is getting the new menu icons made, creating a custom menu cinematic and design, add menu music and add a little Spectator UI.
Then the mod will be finished.
Let me know your experiences and thoughts so far
And here is a video showing something interesting about collision when you shrink the player model..
And here is some Micro Gorge Fun
http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/134543/gorgecraft-mapping-contest
If anyone can offer me some assistance doing some closed beta testing, offering a server to test multi-player or possibly providing some media content, I would be very glad to hear from you.
Things are well on target for the 28th April 2014 Release.
Currently well ahead of schedule for release. 28th April...
One issue I need to look at further, but one issue has me completely confused....
I play GorgeCraft, then do a vote reset. The vote passes and the game resets fine. However, the red-plug then appears, and if I try to move, I just rubberband all over the place.
This is where it gets weird...
So I open up profiler to see what the problem is and, bam, the problem is gone. The game is doing nothing:
Then I turn off the profiler, and sometimes the bug recurs instantly, or sometimes it's gone. Most times it keeps recurring.
This bug happens about 50% of the time after resetting for me, but not all the time. The only thing that happens is a small rendering hike which still uses less than 1ms, and that is just waiting for GC job to finish.
I can't see why this issue occurs at all..
BTW, GorgeCraft testers needed. I've run out of ideas to break the mod, obviously apart from incompatibility with other mods, haha. I've covered everything I can think of, but obviously, as I know the limitations, I may not to think to do some crazy stuff.
If you are interested in trying to break GorgeCraft to ready it for final release, please left me know!!
RC complete and 2 week bug hunt begins - Release on schedule.
The issue as shown forces prediction to go up to an obscene level of frames. According to profile, there is nothing happening code wise of interest. There doesn't seem to be any specific cause for the issue, it will happen at random, although it will also nearly always occur after a successful reset vote, the video above is just during normal gameplay. In total I spent over an hour trying to diagnose this while videoing, and I am at a complete blank. Any help would be gratefully appreciated..
Unfortunately, I have been too busy to create any new media, so I don't have a wonderful video to accompany this release, but just use your imaginations and pretend it is the best launch trailer ever!!
If anyone can assist with making any media etc for the mod, I would appreciate the assistance, I feel a little bit of a sad panda releasing such a monumental update to the mod and having no media to present.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/04/29/gorgecraft-download-natural-selection-2-mod-released/
The game is playable, however there are a few errors that spam through console. While they didn't cause any issues in my very short tests, they may cause issues over a long play period, just to let you know. I will be getting around to fixing them soon.
For now, enjoy GorgeCraft, and for some of you, NS2..
I petitioned UWE 18months aftyer release to leave the game alone, so us modders could make mods and have them run without baby-sitting them every 2 secs, and they did, before handing over to the CDT. If anything the issue has got worse with the CDT, now every CDT update breaks my mods, whereas at least I would survive the odd UWE NS2 update.
If the CDT can't find a way to update the game without breaking mods, I will have to take the three current mods I am working on to a completely different engine.
I am sick and tired of trying to improve the playerbase and diversity of games available for NS2, only to have another bunch of modders break all my efforts every time they release a patch.
CDT, either learn to consider other modders who are trying to make content for this game, or you will drive away the last remaining non-gaming members of the community who are trying to help NS2 to grow and be sustainable.
Now, there _is_ the "requires build" thing, which - SHOULD - give you the lua from a specific build, so you might think it could protect you.
Unfortunately, some performance improvements or bug fixes in the Spark Engine needs the Lua code to change as well (happened in 272)... so running old Lua code on a new engine is not guaranteed to work either.
Now, in general it is really, really difficult to maintain backwards compatibility in ANY system.
The NS2 architecture, which is supposedly "modding friendly", actually makes it utterly impossible. Sure, you can mod anything ... but unless you make a copy of the whole game (including the engine), your mod can be broken by any new patch.
The more ambitious the mod, the worse it gets.
Pretty much the only way of solving that would be for NS2 to support "stable" releases. A stable release would be a frozen copy of the whole game, so no matter what happens in the future, your mod would not break as long as it was based on a stable release.
Of course, any improvements in the game after the stable release would not be visible in your mod, but at least you could convert to later stable releases at your leisure.
Unfortunately, this is not how NS2 is designed... which does mean that "modding friendly" turns out to be "modding hell" in practice.
It _might_ be possible to actually implement this - but it is a fairly major undertaking. Though an interesting one .... and worthwhile from the point of view of CDT, because it would mean that we would be free to change whatever we want in the code without having to worry about breaking mods.
Which we do, btw - it is just that the only practical way of NOT breaking mods is to stop changing anything at all...
If it means a better vanilla ns2 experience, then so be it. More finger wagging at the CDT? They've made lots of great improvements that are definitely worth any issues w/ any mods (especially those that are rarely if ever played). If you think that gorgecraft contributes at all to ns2's sustainability... then I dunno what to say. Threatening to take your mods to another engine is really... funny. Honestly you'd probably be better off, though. If you're tryin to get a wide audience to play your mods, then ns2 is probably the wrong game as far as garnering attention.
Not trying to knock your hard work, I guess I'm just playing devil's advocate. CDT, plz continue standard operating procedure.
I have spent 4 years modding NS2, and would like for nothing more than to create a mod that becomes popular, draws more gamers into purchasing NS2, and have some of those players prefer NS2 and move onto that instead.
Ultimately, my modding goals are about extending the life of NS2, I just feel frustrated that I don't get the opportunity to give back.
Also, while it may be true that breaking my GorgeCraft mod may not really matter as not many play it (although I will point out GorgeCraft does have a few players still, when it is working...), the biggest problem by continually breaking mods is making it impossible for the users to play NS2.
As an example, the big menu update that happened with 267 broke my custom GorgeCraft menu completely. To the point that if you had the mod activated, as a large number of players did, the corrupt menu mean't they couldn't unload mod, meaning they couldn't play GorgeCraft OR NS2. For 2 poor users (that I know about, there may have been more), who I have have been trying to help, have been unable to play NS2 since 267 because of this update, and the fact I was offline.
It wasn't until I released this recent update, they were able to turn off the mod and play NS2 again.
Before you ask, I had done full tech support, including full nuke and they just had this weird issue where GorgeCraft would always load.
Anyway, regardless of your opinion of mods, CDT's breaking of mods does impact on NS2 players, whether it has affected you or not.
All I want is some sort of system where mods break less frequently. My mod uses very little NS2 code as it is, but the interfaces it does have are always being broken. But as Matso pointed out, and I am already painfully aware, even if I was to write my mods from the ground up, using no NS2 code at all, the constant engine updates would ultimately cause something to break anyway.
I know you don't care about mods, and that is your prerogative, I however do care about mods, so I guess we will have to agree to disagree on their importance to NS2 and whether something should be tried to make NS2 more mod friendly.
I know Future Perfect is being developed for modding, but it is still an unknown quantity about how it is going to perform and how flexible it will ultimately be. Personally, at the moment, I am more comfortable with the abilities and limitations of the NS2 spark engine.
Please don't read this back as a rant or anything like that, It is simply a chilled out explanation of my thoughts, where I have waffled on too long... as I'm prone to do
Really? Penises are so 2012... With 25 buildings available, GorgePorn™ has moved to a whole new level...
A little taste of some of my work, pulled from the gorgecraft art thread.
This is one of soul's creations. It is soooo kinky.